MAX11300

If you’re working on a mobile project – a robot, something outside, or even your car – you don’t want to bring an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, signal generator, or any other piece of equipment that should stay on the bench. For his Hackaday Prize Entry, [Pierce Nichols] is working on the electronic equivalent of a Leatherman: something small and portable that also does just enough to get by in a pinch.

The MultiSpork, as [Pierce] calls his device, is a single WiFi enabled board that’s completely portable. With the addition of a $50 Android tablet, it’s very close to a complete electronics lab in a box.

The heart of the MultiSpork is a new chip from Maxim, the MAX 11300. This chip has 20 pins that can be used as a 12-bit ADC, a 12-bit DAC, or as GPIOs. it’s a logic analyzer, signal generator, oscilloscope, and a Bus Pirate in a single chip. As far as the rest of the board goes, [Pierce] is forgoing any notion of a hardware freeze and changing the Atmel microcontroller over to a TI CC3200 chip that will be coming out soon.

[Pierce] put together a short video describing the MultiSpork; you can check that out below.

While FPGAs get all the credit for being the hip new thing, they are inherently digital devices. Without a proper ADC and DAC, you won’t be delving into the analog domain with your programmable logic. Maxim has just put out a chip that does just that: an analog swiss army knife with 20 pins that are configurable as analog to digital converter, digital to analog converters, GPIO, or any mix of the above.

The MAX11300 includes twenty IO ports, each capable of becoming an ADC, DAC, or GPIO, with pairs of ports capable of being configured as a logic level translator or an analog switch. The ADCs and DACs are 12-bit, with input and output ranges from -10V to +10V.

As a nice little bonus, the chip is controlled over SPI, making this an interesting device for a small “do anything analog” tool we’re sure will hit Tindie or Seeed Studio before the year is out. Luckily for whoever would create such a device, Maxim has a nice GUI for configuring each of the 20 pins on their chip, Of course Maxim already offers an evaluation kit for the MAX11300. It’s $100 USD and is Windows only.

The MAX11300 is available in either 40-pin TQFN or 48-pin TQFP packages (with the larger, easier to solder TQFP shipping later) for about $5.80 USD in quantity 1000, or $11.37 in quantity one.Video below showing off the MAX11300 reading and writing analog values to a few pins, and a good look at the configuration software.